Biography
Olivia Cobiskey has worn both fatigues and Hanbok in her quest for a good story. In fact, she's come a long way from the six-year-old child that followed her grandmother around with crayon and paper demanding that everyone stop and watch her scribble.
She still remembers the first moment she walked into a newsroom. It was her freshman year and there was a protest rally outside the sigma chi fraternity house. She doesn't remember how she got there, but does remember meeting the editor, Geoffrey White, of The Daily Lobo that night and walking back with him to the newsroom - the smell of paper, cigarette smoke, coffee and justice permeated the air. Talking to the other journalism students late into the night she felt alive under the bright lights of the newsroom filled with chipped paint and dusty monitors and she knew then she was hooked.
As an undergraduate she wrote for both The Daily Lobo and the Albuquerque Jewish paper The Link until 1995. At the end of the 1993 fall semester and sponsored by the Journalism Department at the University of New Mexico, she boarded a plane to Israel. In Israel she interviewed anyone about everything - from studying abroad to the different political factions and how they viewed the then fledgling peace process. Rabin wouldn't be shot for another year and everything still seemed possible. After returning to Albuquerque, she continued to write and placed 17th in editorial writing with the William Randolph Hearst Foundation Journalism Awards Program.
After completing her undergraduate work at the University of New Mexico and logging a brief stint at the Albuquerque Tribune, she found herself in Korea. There she finished her military duty in the Army Reserves as an intelligence analyst, and taught in both the Korean public school system and Yonsei University.
Only planning to be in Korea for a year, she stayed for four, finding the cultures, the antithesis of anything she had experienced before, fascinating. She learned to make Kimchi and haggle in Korean, climbed up Mt. Kinabalu in Malaysia and watched a goat sacrifice in the mountains of Nepal. She was witness to the Asian sex trade as she watched six year old girls sell themselves on the streets of Thailand. And she fed stray cats at her favorite temple in Macau (Hong Kong). Each new encounter, experience remembered, labeled and filed away, teaching her something about the world and herself, creating a unique voice, a writer.
With a myriad of life experience and a thirst for life that would make a vampire blush, after four years as a "global citizen" of a dozen countries, Ms. Cobiskey decided to return to the United States to continue her education. A firm believer in serendipity, she closed her eyes and threw a dart at a map of the U.S. It had hit Chicago. She enrolled in the masters in public affairs reporting program at Columbia College Chicago, where she also served as an undergraduate journalism instructor.
Ms. Cobiskey has worked for The Chicago Tribune, Tribune Media Services, Red Eye (Chicago), Illinois Issues, StreetWise, Zipple.com, JUF News, The Saudi Gazette, and newsletters for the National Restaurant Association and the Association of Women Journalists. Her articles have also ran in other major market newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times.
A recipient of several scholarships and awards, Ms. Cobiskey was most recently named the 2004 David S. Barr winner for an article she wrote for The Saudi Gazette and StreetWise on a domestic violence shelter for Muslim women. She was also chosen as a Poynter Institute Fellow for summer 2004.
Now, Ms. Cobiskey is working her way up the professional food chain. She hopes to one day work in the field as an international correspondent soon.